Lots of stories – some of them hilarious, some of them tragic – about the increasing use of social media by HR professionals are out there.

Until now, much of the use has been directed toward finding and screening candidates. But problems associated with such use have begun to ripple out, and HR professionals everywhere are (or at least should be) thinking through their internet use policies. Here’s some predictive food for thought about how the great HR – social media partnership will evolve through 2011.

Scanning Social Media

We’ve all heard a story about someone who had a lock on a job only to lose it because of some imprudent public disclosure on Facebook or MySpace. Some have cried, “invasion of privacy!”, but that isn’t really accurate when it’s the potential employee himself or herself posting the highlights of an all-weekend drinking spree. The newer complaint is more along the lines of “is that really a big deal?”

In other words, would anyone look good if all their good times in college were revealed? Does getting drunk at a wedding mean “unqualified for employment”? And does using a swear word (or the equivalent, like “#*@!”) in a tweet mean that you are probably toxic to a congenial office atmosphere?

More seriously, what if the incriminating photo was posted by a friend or, worse yet, an enemy?

Part of the problem is the inability to differentiate between “friends” and “a close-knit group of friends” on Facebook and other social media sites – a problem that Facebook is supposedly going to address soon. It will be harder to see exchanges, photos, and videos in those more-private groups – but not impossible, to say the least.

So HR professionals will have to continue to develop their social media screening protocols and – importantly – figure out what to communicate publicly. We’ve all seen signs proudly saying “We test for drug use. Don’t bother to apply if you use drugs.” Why not something similar for social media? Or at least a policy that an applicant can easily access?

Recruitment

Monster.com more or less started the “internet as job recruitment site” trend, with craigslist, LinkedIn, and others filling out and expanding the market ever since. Rumor has it that Facebook is soon going to launch a business-edged personal career center called BranchOut. For the HR professional trying to find and screen candidates in 2011, this means….what?

Not much, in all probability. It won’t be any harder or easier to find information about candidates online, and the big problem is still the reliability of the information.

If anything, the shift to recruiting online makes life more difficult for the candidates themselves. They have to update their LinkedIn page, their contacts, their documents (like résumés and references), and their professional association status on a weekly basis – and that’s whether they’re employed or not.

The recruiters, it seems, are the real beneficiaries of the social media revolution. Also, as social media progresses world-class recruiting software and staffing software will become even more vital for HR and staffing professionals.

Personal Branding

Where some see difficulty, others see opportunity. Lots of young professionals are thinking of themselves, at least in part, as a commodity that must be intelligently marketed. They’ve heard the statistics about working for 5-10 different companies over a career, and they know from the latest downturn that everyone is a candidate for a layoff. So they make sure they are appropriately “branded” at all times, and they use all the social media tools to make it easier for those recruiters to find them.

For HR professionals, this trend won’t make it any easier to know how reliable a well-branded candidate’s information is, but it won’t make it any harder either. Those old-fashioned tools like phone calls and face-to-face interviews (or the new-fashioned image-to-image interviews)
will still be very much needed.

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